Bennett Cerf Quotations

The person who can bring the spirit of laughter into a room is indeed blessed.

The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.

Middle age is when your old classmates are so grey and wrinkled and bald they don't recognize you.

A pat on the back, through only a few vertebrae removed from a kick in the pants, is miles ahead in results.

For me, a hearty "belly laugh" is one of the beautiful sounds in the world.

Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance.

Fame - anyone who says he doesn't like it is crazy

The Atomic Age is here to stay - but are we?

An oboe is an ill-wind that nobody blows good.

Do I believe in ghosts? Of course I do. So do you. Deep in the souls of the most sophisticated of us is lurking a fear of the supernatural which all the discoveries of scientists cannot eradicate.

In a notable family called Stein There were Gertrude, and Ep, and then Ein. Gert's writing was hazy, Ep's statues were crazy, And nobody understood Ein.

Football season: The only time of the year when a man can walk down the street with a blond on one arm and a blanket on the other without encountering raised eyebrows.

Censor: A self-appointed snoophound who sticks his nose in other people's business.

There once was a student named Bessor Whose knowledge grew lessor and lessor. It at last grew so small He knew nothing at all, And today he's a college professor!

Oratory is the art of making a loud noise sound like a deep thought.

One of the troubles of the day, observes Mr. C.N. Peac, is that once we came upon the little red schoolhouse, whereas now we come upon the little-read school boy.

Everybody was being decent, and when people are decent, thing work out for everybody. That has been my theory all through life. If you're making money, let the other fellow make it too. If somebody's getting hurt, it's bad, but if you can work a thing out so that everybody profits that's the ideal business.

I can't say this too often - that a little humor can make life worth living. That has always been my credo. Somebody once asked me, 'What would you like your epitaph to be?' I've always said that I'd like it to be: He left people a little happier than they were when he came into the room.

TV's sameness has destroyed many things, such as the American urge toward independent thought.

There is a mass of people, we might as well admit, who if they weren't watching television, would be doing absolutely nothing else.

The fundamental difference between the mystery story and the ghost story is the fact that a mystery demands a solution for its effectiveness; a ghost story is necessarily unsolvable; the reader must be willing to accept the fact that nothing is proved.

The fact that we don't read more books in America can be traced squarely to the fact that we have newspapers that are about a hundred times as big as the newspapers anywhere else.

Television, I love it, everything that happened before television lumped together, never caused folks to turn on a street to stare at me, or waitresses to ask for autographs.

Politicians are like ships: noisiest when lost in a fog.

One of the greatest threats facing book publishing, and the entire country for that matter, is censorship.

Most of the things that are supposed to be so objectionable in books are things that every teenager, in the United States, not only knows, but has talked about at length in school, or on the way home from school.

I think it's become fashionable for the snobbish egghead today to make fun of television. I've heard many people, boast, "I would never have a television set in my house," well, these people are fools.

I think the right to read, is one of our inherent rights, and I think that people in America today are intelligent enough to decide for themselves what they want to read. Without being told, by self-appointed people, you must not read this, or you cannot read this.

They tell about a fifteen-year-old boy in an orphans' home who had an incurable stutter. One Sunday the minister was detained and the boy volunteered to say the prayer in his stead. He did it perfectly, too, without a single stutter. Later he explained, "I don't stutter when I talk to God. He loves me."

Banquet: a plate of cold, hairy chicken and artificially coloured green peas completely surrounded by dreary speeches and appeals for donations.

Reading is a pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and quickness count for something. The fun of reading is not that something is told to you, but that you stretch your mind. Your own imagination works along with the authors, or even goes beyond his, yields the same or different conclusions, and your ideas develop as you understand his.

I don't stutter when I talk to God. He loves me.

Censor: A self-appointed snoop hound who sticks his nose in other people's business

There have been too many books in which some young man is looking forward, backward or sideways in anger. Or in which some Southern youth is being chased through the magnolia bushes by his aunt. She catches him on page 28 with horrid results.

What rotten luck. Obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax!

A person who can bring the spirit of laughter into a room is indeed blessed.